Mobile devices, software and services occupy a growing share of everyday lives of billions of people. According to 2018 market statistics, there are over five billion users of mobile Internet. US users spend over five hours per day on mobile devices. Not surprisingly, mobile online traffic exceeds 50% of the overall Internet traffic and users spend over 69% of their Internet time on smartphones—over 70% of that Internet time is spent on mobile applications. Mobile influenced online spending has already exceeded one trillion dollars; in particular, 90% of smartphone owners use their phone while making purchasing decisions in brick and mortar stores.
Mobile communications have been one of the top five mobile application categories for a long while. According to market research, in 2017, mobile messaging applications have hit a new milestone: over 75% of the world's smartphone owners have used at least one such application. On each of the two most popular platforms, Android and iOS, the number of smartphone owners who are using messaging applications on a monthly basis exceeds 50%. It is estimated that, by the end of 2017, 1.82 billion people worldwide regularly used messaging applications, a 15.5% annual increase. This number is expected to increase to almost 2.5 billion users of mobile messaging applications by 2021.
Top mobile messaging applications significantly vary from region to region and from country to country. The list of top ten global mobile messaging applications starts with the WhatsApp with 1.5 billion users, followed by the Facebook Messenger with 1.3 billion users, and ends with Snapchat, LINE and Telegram with 200-250 million users each. The US picture is quite different, where the Facebook Messenger (over 103M users) leads by more than a 2:1 margin over the second place Snapchat, while the WhatsApp occupies the third place with less than 20 million users. In China, WeChat is by far the most popular messaging application, while Viber dominates the mobile messaging space in Ukraine.
At the core of mobile messaging applications is a very limited standard set of features: texting, including peer-to-peer and group chat, voice and video calls, photo and file sharing, and contact management. In contemporary mobile messaging applications, this basic feature set is greatly expanded and may include advanced security attributes, including end-to-end encryption and time-limited, self-destroying content; expressive features, such as emoticons, emojis and extensive libraries of stickers; user and friend discovery; extensive content libraries; social and gaming features; embedded maps and geo-positioning enhancements; in-product marketing and e-commerce, etc.
Notwithstanding a significant progress in the development and proliferation of mobile messaging applications on all significant platforms, functioning of the mobile messaging applications, especially some of the voice related features, invite significant improvements. The basic mobile voice messaging metaphor is built around conventional calls and is split into distinct sessions, where each session requires a manual connection by a caller, often takes a significant time before the session starts and also necessitates a manual disconnection to end the call. User interface for group voice messaging is under-developed and does not include clear visualization of status, activity levels, and contribution of each call participant. Replay features for a majority of mobile messaging applications are limited to basic scrolling back and forth through the history of conversations and don't include replay of voice calls. Most mobile messaging applications don't include custom content delivery in a desired format when, for example, some of the users are driving a car and cannot follow text chat or any visual communications. Some other features of voice messaging are sub-standard, such as a voice duplication when several call participants are located in proximity and hear both the immediate speech and a delayed replica of the speech through the messaging channel. In other words, there is no single messaging space for mobile multimedia communications.
Accordingly, it is desirable to create a continuous communication application that combines seamless multimodal communications with automatic delivery of content to each user in a preferred media type.